By now, everyone who needed to receive a copy of the third GameSpite Bonus Book should have their books in hand. I hope, anyway!

I hesitate to call them books, as they’re decidedly slim volumes — at 40 pages in the 5×8″ format, they have roughly the same amount of text as a modern video game magazine. But they’re not really magazines, nor are they novellas, booklets, pamphlets, or eldritch tomes of wisdom. I guess “book” will do the trick for now. I am but one man publishing six books of varying length per year entirely with his free time; please bear with my fragile, unprofessional imperfections.

The premise of this particular “book” is that it was meant to be something of an attempt to translate the concept of oral tradition over to the history of the video game medium. Kind of. I won’t pretend I did an amazing job of it, or that it was a stunningly original concept, but I do feel the end result was moderately interesting. The book (“book,” yes, whatever) juxtaposed a handful of essays about some of my more fondly remembered experiences with a selection of classic games alongside more objective, historical retrospectives. In short, it combines the two things I find essential for exploring the history of the medium: The actual history and nature of the works in question, and the personal and experiential aspect of the medium.

So, now you’ll perhaps better understand the nature of this particular piece — it’s one of three of the anecdotal essays I wrote about Final Fantasy III (VI, if you prefer) for the book. Is it worthwhile as a standalone article? Probably not! But in the context of the larger work, it has its charms. I apologize that it will be a few days before the remainder of the FFIII write-ups are posted. Until then, you’ll just have to suffer through without that precious context.